Spent about 30 minutes w/ Verizon tech support last night, and 30 mins w/ Apple this morning. Apparently it's very common w/ former Alltel subscribers. That's not me though - I did an ESN swap. I was able to face time before the ESN swap, but after the swap I get the "waiting for activation." Things I tried, both on my own and at Apple Tech Support's prompting (all of which were unsuccessful for me, but might work for someone else):
- reset network settings (numerous times)
- reset all settings (numerous times)
- turn facetime on and off and back on again
- turn facetime off, power phone down, then back on again, then turn facetime on again
- hard reset
- make sure I could send and receive both SMS and MMS
The Apple guy then put me on hold and worked w/ Verizon to ensure that my text messaging was set up correctly (it was). Then he asked her to remove text messaging from my account and then re-provision it. Still didn't work.
So, the Apple guy has escalated it to the FaceTime engineers to find out if they are receiving the SMS Activation Request from my phone (they should be) and if so, why their servers are not send back an "OK to Activate" message. May just need to be reset or something.
He hopes to have an answer and get back to me today. I will post back here when I hear back.
My guess is that the FaceTime servers are getting the SMS from my phone and denying activation because they "think" my phone should be assigned to a different number. We'll see...